CFL Attendance 2010 Analysis

New warning! The new 2011 CFL attendance analysis post is here!

Warning! This post actually analyzes the CFL attendance for 2009. For analysis of the 2010 season including the best road drawing teams, go here.


Last year Tigercatatonia made several posts analyzing the 2008 attendance for CFL teams. Time has come around again to have a look again. We'll start out with the average home regular season attendance for each team in 2009:

1. Edmonton 37,164
2. Calgary 36502
3. Saskatchewan 30606
4. BC 28610
5. Toronto 26374
6. Winnipeg 25720
7. Hamilton 22532
8. Montreal 20202
Total 227,710
Here's the numbers from the previous season:

Edmonton 37383
BC 34083
Calgary 32617
Saskatchewan 29758
Toronto 29189
Winnipeg 27151
Hamilton 20784
Montreal 20202
Total 231,167

Thus 2009 was not a particular banner year for the CFL. BC was way way down, with both Winnipeg and Toronto seeing declines. Edmonton had a slight decline, despite a monster attendance game of over 62,000 against Saskatchewan. Saskatchewan had a bump, as did Calgary with the extra capacity for the Grey Cup available late in the season.

Surprisingly Hamilton had a decent 8.4% jump. Probably the cheap tickets the team made available at the end of the 2009 season helped, as did the Labour Day sellout with over 30,000, plus a much better team. Likely the Cats could have done better with a better economy. With momentum of a better team and a slowly recovering economy hopefully the Cats can boost season tickets sales over last year and get another bump in attendance.

Montreal stayed the same, due to selling out their capacity yet again. With an added 5,000 seats this season at McGill stadium, Montreal will likely beat Hamilton in attendance this year.

Overall the CFL saw a 4.1% decline in attendance in 2009, which isn't too bad considering the economy and the performance of other professional leagues in North America. Baseball for instance had a larger 6.5% decline in 2009.

In a future post, I will look again at which teams drew the best on the road. Here's my analysis for the 2008 season. I'm going to go way out on a limb and predict Saskatchewan will again lead this category.